The eNotes Blog Top Ten Self-Deprecating Quotes fromAuthors

Top Ten Self-Deprecating Quotes fromAuthors The literary world is a pretentious place, right? You wouldnt think so judging by these ten quotes from authors playfully poking fun at their success. Who knew the Paris Review was such a popular venue in which to be self-deprecating? Know of any others? Tell us in a comment below. 1. Vladimir Nabokov Lolita  is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name. - in  The Paris Review, 1967 2. Mark Twain I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up. –  The Innocents Abroad 3. Ray Bradbury A conglomerate heap of trash, that’s what I am. But it burns with a high flame. - in  The Paris Review, 2010 4. Kurt Vonnegut Slapstick  may be a very bad book. I am perfectly willing to believe that. Everybody else writes lousy books, so why shouldn’t I? What was unusual about the reviews was that they wanted people to admit now that I had never been any good. The reviewer for the Sunday  Times  actually asked critics who had praised me in the past to now admit in public how wrong they’d been. My publisher, Sam Lawrence, tried to comfort me by saying that authors were invariably attacked when they became fabulously well-to-do†¦ I had suffered, all right - but as a badly educated person in vulgar company and in a vulgar trade. It was dishonorable enough that I perverted art for money. I then topped that felony by becoming, as I say, fabulously well-to-do. Well, that’s just too damn bad for me and for everybody. I’m completely in print, so we’re all stuck with me and stuck with my books. - in  The Paris Review, 1977 5. Stephen King I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and Fries. 6. David Sedaris At the end of a miserable day, instead of grieving my virtual nothing, I can always look at my loaded wastepaper basket and tell myself that if I failed, at least I took a few trees down with me. - Me Talk Pretty One Day 7. Jonathan Lethem Listen, you can’t imagine what a freak I was. I worked in used bookstores as a teenager. I grew up with hippie parents. I lived in a ten-year cultural lag. At  all  times. I had not the faintest idea what was contemporary. When I got to Bennington, and I found that Richard Brautigan and Thomas Berger and Kurt Vonnegut and Donald Barthelme were not ‘the contemporary,’ but were in fact awkward and embarrassing and had been overthrown by something else, I was as disconcerted as a time traveler. The world I’d dwelled in was now apocryphal. No one read Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell, the Beats were regarded with embarrassment. When all that was swept away, I stopped knowing what contemporary literature was. I didn’t replace it; I just stopped knowing. - in  The Paris Review, 2003 8. John Grisham I can’t change overnight into a serious literary author. You can’t compare apples to oranges. William Faulkner was a great literary genius. I am not. 9. Dorothy Parker I fell into writing, I suppose, being one of those awful children who wrote verses. I went to a convent in New York- the Blessed Sacrament†¦Ã‚  I was fired from there, finally, for a lot of things, among them my insistence that the Immaculate Conception was spontaneous combustion. - in  The Paris Review, 1956 10. And the self-deprecating author who took it to the highest extreme? Thatd have to be Gary Shteyngart, who created a five minute parody of himself to promote his book Super Sad True Love Story: He really wants to cash in on this whole Hollywood vampire thing, but with werewolves But theyre not wolves, theyre bears. Werebears. Images and quotes courtesy of Flavorwire.

Facts About the Dwarf Seahorse

Facts About the Dwarf Seahorse The dwarf seahorse  (Hippocampus zosterae)  is a small seahorse  found in the Western Atlantic Ocean. They are also known as little seahorses or pygmy seahorses.   Description: The maximum length of a dwarf seahorse is just under 2 inches. Like many other seahorse species, it has a variety of color forms, which range from tan to green to almost black. Their skin may be mottled, have dark spots, and covered in tiny warts. These seahorses have a short snout, and a coronet on top of their head that is very high and column-like or knob-like in shape. They may also have filaments extending from their head and body.   Dwarf seahorses have 9-10 bony rings around their trunk and 31-32 rings around their tail.   Classification Kingdom: AnimaliaPhylum: ChordataClass: ActinopterygiiOrder: GasterosteiformesFamily: SyngnathidaeGenus: HippocampusSpecies:  Zosterae Habitat and Distribution Dwarf seahorses live in shallow waters populated with  seagrasses. In fact, their distribution coincides with the availability of seagrasses.  They may also be found in floating vegetation. They live in the Western Atlantic Ocean in southern Florida, Bermuda, Bahamas and the Gulf of Mexico. Feeding Dwarf seahorses eat small crustaceans  and tiny fish. Like other seahorses, they are ambush predators, and use  their long snout with a pipette-like motion  to suck in their food as it passes by. Reproduction The breeding season for dwarf seahorses runs from February to November. In captivity, these animals have been reported to mate for life. Dwarf seahorses have a complex, four phase  courtship ritual that involves color changes, performing vibrations while attached to a holdfast. They may also swim around their holdfast. Then the female points her head upward, and the male responds by also pointing his head upward. Then they rise up into the water column and intertwine tails.   Like other seahorses, dwarf seahorses are ovoviviparous, and the female produces eggs that are reared in the males brood pouch.  The female produces about 55 eggs which are about 1.3 mm in size. It takes about 11 days for the eggs to hatch into miniature seahorses which are about 8 mm in size.   Conservation and Human Uses This species is listed as  data deficient  on the  IUCN Red List  due to a lack of published data on population numbers or trends in this species. This species is threatened by habitat degradation, especially because they rely on such shallow habitat.  They also are caught as bycatch  and caught live in Florida waters for the aquarium trade. In the U.S., this species is a candidate for listing for protection under the Endangered Species Act. References and Further Information: Irey, B. 2004. Hippocampus zosterae. Animal Diversity Web. Accessed September 30, 2014Lourie, S.A.,  Foster, S.J., Cooper, E.W.T. and A.C.J. Vincent. 2004. A Guide to the Identification of Seahorses. Project Seahorse and TRAFFIC North America. 114 pp.Lourie, S.A., A.C.J. Vincent and H.J. Hall, 1999. Seahorses: an identification guide to the worlds species and their conservation. Project Seahorse, London. 214 p.  via FishBase, September 30, 2014.Masterson, J. 2008. Hippocampus zosterae. Smithsonian Marine Station. Accessed September 30, 2014.NOAA Fisheries. Dwarf Seahorse (Hippocampus zosterae). Accessed September 30, 2014.Project Seahorse 2003.  Hippocampus zosterae. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Version 2014.2. www.iucnredlist.org.  Accessed September 30, 2014.